We are almost certainly wrong

As individuals, and as societies, we rightfully dismiss a bunch of crazy theories. However, we can't dismiss them with 100% confidence. We are pretty sure that the moon landing wasn't faked, that UFOs aren't stashed at Roswell, that we are not part of a computer simulation (à la Matrix), etc. Let's say there are 100 of these crackpot theories, and that we are 95% certain that each one is incorrect. That seems pretty good, right? We are 95% sure that all of those theories are incorrect, right?

This is where things get strange. Even though we are 95% sure that each of the crackpot theories is incorrect, we shouldn't be 95% confident that all of the theories are wrong. If there is a 5% chance that each one is correct, then the chance that all 100 theories are incorrect is actually only 0.6%! In other words, at least one of the theories is almost certainly correct, and probably quite a few of them are correct.

So does this mean that you should start believing crackpot theories? No - and that's the craziest part of all. The key is that we don't know which of our beliefs are wrong. It is rational to disbelieve all of the crackpot theories and believe that some of your beliefs are wrong.

Rent-A-Shovel

The Internet is changing the way the world works in a lot of ways. From work to play to hobbies, the Web is touching almost everything that we do. One of the primary tools that the Internet uses to disrupt things is the reduction of transaction costs.

Transaction costs are basically the costs of buying something that are outside of the actual price. Wikipedia gives the example of buying a banana; transaction costs include figuring out what kinds of bananas you like, traveling to the store, waiting in line, etc. (Note that not all of these costs actually cost money - losing time and energy are also real costs)

We have already seen a hint of how the Internet reduces these costs, and how dramatically that can change industries and behavior. Before the Internet, the idea of having hundreds of thousands of people work together to create an encyclopedia would be beyond ludicrous. Just finding that many people willing to help would be incredibly expensive, and then organizing and reconciling their contributions would be very nearly impossible.

Reading about the creation of the original Oxford English Dictionary shows just how difficult a project like this used to be. For years, editors received over 1,000 slips of paper per day from word-lovers around the world, detailing word usage. They stored the slips of paper in 1,029 pigeon-holes in "the Scriptorium", a large shed built specifically to store and organize the submissions. Seventy years (yes, 70!) after the project began, the full dictionary was published. Multiple editors had given the majority of their lives to the project, and most died before it was completed. And all that for "only" 252,200 entries. In less than 10 years, Wikipedia editors have created and collaborated on over 9,000,000 articles (almost 3.5 million for just the English language Wikipedia).

The transaction costs to recruit volunteers and organize information still exist, but the Internet (along with tools like wikis) has reduced them at least 1000-fold, and probably much more. This reduction in costs has made the previously impossible happen, to our benefit.

There are plenty of other transaction costs that the Internet is starting to chip away at. Email and Twitter and Facebook make it much easier for us to communicate with each other. Amazon and Ebay have made it much easier for us to research products and to buy and sell things. Knowing that I can resell almost anything that I buy changes my attitude toward buying things. I see a lot of things as short-term purchases that I can own for as long as I want, and then sell to someone else. That is a new option.

These trends are only going to continue. There are stirrings of other industries where the Internet and its associated technologies are starting to change things. Peer-to-peer lending like Lending Club allows savers to lend money to borrowers, using the Internet as the aggregator and middleman instead of a bank, thereby offering better returns to investors, and better rates to borrowers.

Other companies like Whipcar and airbnb let you rent out your car or a room in your house, respectively. The Internet may allow us to move from an ownership society to a "rentership" society, where the Internet makes it convenient enough and cheap enough to rent things as we need them, from cars to power tools, and maybe even cameras and snow shovels.

The Widening of Frontiers

We live in an incredible, wonderful time. I call our time the Age of Wikipedia. Our understanding of the world around us has been exploding, and access to that knowledge exploding even faster. A child with access to the Internet has riches of knowledge that da Vinci and Darwin could have only dreamed of.

We are all beneficiaries of mankind's increased knowledge. Our standard of living is directly impacted by new inventions, new manufacturing processes, and new discoveries. But there has been one casualty of this rapid explosion of information.

The Age of Wikipedia has killed the Renaissance Man. Da Vinci made significant contributions to our understanding of anatomy, astronomy, engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics, and made smaller contributions to many other fields.

Today, nearly all of the incredible breakthroughs that da Vinci made are taught in first-year classes in their respective disciplines. Like a balloon that is continually expanding, the frontiers of our knowledge keep growing. The balloon of human knowledge in da Vinci's time was small enough that he could help to expand it in multiple places.

In order to really study something, to make breakthroughs, you have to be at the edges. These days, we have a much larger balloon; it takes a lot more work to get to the edges. It really takes a PhD before you can hope to contribute to a field.

For an aspiring Renaissance Man like me, this can be depressing. When a subject catches my fancy, I often begin by looking it up on Wikipedia. I am quickly immersed by information, and the realization that the waters are much deeper than I realized.

For example, I have recently been enamored with the idea of simple actors (e.g., ants, businesses) working together to build something more complex than any of the individual actors understand (e.g., nests, economies). In my Internet research, I discovered that this is called emergence, and that there are branches of computer science and philosophy and biology and linguistics and sociology that focus on emergence. There is even an Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence.

This idea that I had never considered before has an entire industry built around it. There are people who study it for a living. There are websites and magazines about it. This should be enabling and invigorating, but I generally find it depressing. It feels as though I would have to devote a lifetime in order to learn anything "new", anything that humanity doesn't already know.

It's hard to decide what ideas are worth a lifetime.